What a logo has to do

This module follows one logo job the way a working designer runs it, starting with the first conversation about a mark and ending with the folder of finished files that goes to the client. It assumes you can already use a vector program and have met the basics of type. What it adds is the order of the work and the decisions inside each step, which is the part most tutorials skip on their way to the clever bit. The Branding course already explains what an identity system holds, the main kinds of logo and how a symbol is reduced, and the Typography module covers logotypes in depth. Those lessons are linked wherever they help. This one is about doing it.

Start with the job, because most weak logos are trying to do a different one. A logo identifies. It tells someone, in the second they give it, that this parcel or this post or this van belongs to one company and not to the one beside it. Designers call this job identification, and it does not include explaining what the company sells. Paul Rand made the point in the booklet he wrote for NeXT, signed in spring 1986. Ideally, he wrote, a logo would explain or suggest the business, but that is rarely possible or even necessary. Tom Geismar, whose studio drew the Chase and NBC marks, said it more plainly in a film made for the AIGA in 2017. The job of a logo is to make you identify.

Three tests follow from that job, and the people who design marks for a living keep coming back to them. Sagi Haviv of Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv set them out in Bloomberg Businessweek in 2012. A mark should be an uncomplicated form that can work anywhere, it must be appropriate and relevant to the company and its field, and it must be memorable. Appropriate means the right temperament, so a bank feels steady and a toy shop does not. Nor does it mean a product shot. Memorable usually means distinctive, different enough from everything else in the category that a person could describe it to a friend or doodle it from memory. Simple is what lets the first two survive the places a logo actually goes.

Those places have multiplied. A mark now has to read in a browser tab a few pixels high, inside a round profile picture, on a phone's home screen beside a hundred other icons, in one colour on a rubber stamp, embroidered on a shirt and across the front of a shop. When Google rebuilt its logo in 2015, the first line of its design team's brief asked for a scalable mark that could convey the feeling of the full logotype in constrained spaces. That is the modern problem in one sentence. Every lesson in this module comes back to it, because a logo that works only at the size it was drawn is a picture, and a logo has to be far more useful than that.

The module runs in the order of the work. It begins with the brief for a mark, then the research and word lists that feed the sketching, and a session of a hundred thumbnails. Then it divides. Most logos are a name drawn well, a symbol, or both together, so one lesson covers drawing a wordmark and the next covers finding a symbol. After that comes drawing the chosen route clean in vector, testing it at every size and making its colour and one-colour versions. The last steps are presenting it to a client and building the file pack. The final lesson runs the whole process on No. 4, the face oil from Kochi used across the site, and then hands it to you.

AI appears in every step of this process now, and its place is narrow. A language model is good at widening a word list, sorting a wall of competitors into groups and checking a file pack against a list of what should be in it. Image models will produce logo-like pictures by the hundred. What they produce is close to the average of the logos they have seen, often with point structures nobody could maintain, and ownership is shaky too. On 29 January 2025 the US Copyright Office concluded that AI output can be protected only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements, and that prompts alone are not enough. A mark is the asset a company most needs to own outright. The drawing stays with a person.